Symantec warns of Trojan.Sasfis threat

Incidents of the Sasfis Trojan are on the rise

Security firm Symantec has warned users about the growing menace posed by the Trojan.Sasfis malware.

The company said in a blog post that it had seen a recurrence in incidents of the Trojan, and that many businesses are not prepared to deal with the threat.

Trojan.Sasfis arrives as an attachment in an official looking email from Amazon or iTunes, for example, and attempts to convince recipients to open it.

Once installed, the malware receives commands from a host server, and attempts to covertly install a number of applications, many of which may consume as much as 94 per cent of CPU power.

Symantec said that the Trojan will often inject itself into common processes, including iexplore.exe and svchost.exe.

"Trojan.Sasfis is essentially a back door Trojan that performs various actions when it receives commands from a malicious host. Downloading and installing misleading applications is the most common of these that we have observed to date," noted the blog post.

"So our advice is, as always, don’t open attachments unless you are absolutely sure who they are from and what they are."